Reginald Marsh was an instrumental art figure in the Depression Era of NYC. He studied at Yale, ASL and Paris and later learned an egg tempra and emulsion technique from Jacques Maroger from 1940-46. He painted scenes of amusement parks, crowded subways, vaudeville and night clubs as well as the busy harbors and railroad stations of New York.

In the younger generation of American artists, those who came forward since the First World War, Reginald Marsh stood apart as the offspring of the city, a painter concerned exclusively with the urban scene. After his schooling at Lawrenceville and Yale, he settled in New York, and in a short time became conspicuous for his studies of the humbler aspects of metropolitan life. Influenced by the robust Americanism of John Sloan, and with the same eye for significant detail, Marsh turned his back on the esthetic whims and theories of the day, and established headquarters in lower Manhattan. A man of even temperament, with no disposition to take sides in economic or social issues, or to whip himself into a fighting rage, he was an observer of life, or that very real slice of it extending from the shop and subway to the dance hall and Coney Island. Other artists have painted the city, but with a grinning cynicism, or a political bias that destroys reality: Marsh, in contrast, really loved New York and all its grand vulgarity.

Marsh worked as a staff artist for the New York Daily News from 1922-25 and continued to be a contributing artist/writer for national magazines such as The New Yorker, Esquire and Harper's Bazaar. His retrospective was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1955. Marsh was also a professor at the ASL from 1935-54.